zlacker

>>feross+(OP)
That's a very thin line between moderation and censorship. When in doubt about which is which, think if if obeys freedom of speech or not.

Deleting a comment because it is insulting a person is moderation. Deleting a comment because you don't like it, it doesn't conform to your views or you find it outrageous, silly, inflammatory, false, fake is censorship.

>>DeathA+Vu
It's maddeningly difficult to distinguish those thin lines in oneself. I've been working on that for years and it takes all the self-awareness I have. This makes me happy that HN is small (by internet standards) because how do you scale self-awarness? It seems almost an oxymoron.

Your comment brings this out because some subset of "outrageous, silly, inflammatory, false, fake" is right on the cusp, and making those calls (to moderate or not to moderate?) puts tremendous pressure on one's own feelings and beliefs. What helps one do it neutrally is self-awareness, but that is the scarcest thing there is. It takes a decade of hard work to distill a bit more. (Edit: and I'm not claiming to have much; just that it's needed.)

I'm uncomfortable with the "false" / "fake" end of your spectrum because we don't have a truth meter. Who am I to decide what's true or false or "mis" or "dis" for anybody else? I'm not taking on that karma.

"Inflammatory" is easier to work with because it's about predictable community effects and one can moderate for community cohesion. Moderating that way ends up excluding truths that the community can't withstand, but such truths probably exist for any community. Groups may even be defined by what they exclude. We can try to stretch those limits but there's only so much elasticity available.

I blanched when I read "Moderation is the normal business activity of ensuring that your customers like using your product" in the OP, but actually that's basically saying moderation is about community cohesion and I can't disagree. But the secret agenda, on HN at least, is to stretch it.

>>dang+vw
> HN is relatively small

...Is it? I mean, compared to Twitter, sure, but for a private forum I think of it as relatively large.

>>andrew+gx
By internet standards. We're 2 or more orders of magnitude smaller than the marquee names. My guess (which I don't want to find out by experience) is that the pressure scales non-linearly, so a hundred times the users would mean who-knows-how-many-zeros more pressure.

HN feels mid-size in a good way. Most forums are a lot smaller, and then there are the few famous ones that are much much larger. There aren't that many in HN's order of magnitude. The mid range is a nice place to hang because although the problems are impossible, they're not utterly impossible. You can work with them around the margins.

>>dang+Px
How big is HN? Is there a stats page? How many users, daily visits, posts, etc.?

>>perilu+031
There's no stats page but last I checked it was around 5M monthly unique users (depending on how you count them), perhaps 10M page views a day (including a guess at API traffic), and something like 1300 submissions (stories) and 13k comments a day.

The most interesting number is the 1300 submissions because that hasn't grown since 2011 - it just fluctuates. Everything else has been growing more or less linearly for a long time, which is how we like it.

>>dang+g62
Thanks dang. Submissions not growing could mean the the users are already finding and submitting most of the interesting stories out there, and there's not much more to find.